The European Union considering temporary facial recognition ban

The EU is due to publish a paper in February exploring how to better regulate emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence. But a draft of the upcoming document has shown that another worrisome technology – facial recognition software – is also being scrutinized. The EU is even going so far as to propose a three to five-year ban on the technology to allow rules and regulations time to catch up.

Regulation for some of the worst aspects of the internet age has been notoriously slow to come about. People spent 20 years giving away personal data before governments and regulators started to take the issue seriously. That’s not a mistake that the EU are wanting to repeat, as they are looking to ensure that issues around new and emerging technologies are given adequate consideration.

In a new draft of a European Commission whitepaper on artificial intelligence, mention is made of the inherent risks to privacy and human rights that ‘biometric remote identification’ (i.e. facial recognition) poses. And one current solution that the EU is exploring is, “a time-limited ban on the use of facial recognition by private or public actors in public spaces.”